


Give a Man a Fish (Give a Spider a Fly)

by BlackBlood1872



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Origin Story, Pre-Canon, Web Martin Blackwood, soft monsters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-08 00:33:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20826392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackBlood1872/pseuds/BlackBlood1872
Summary: In the beginning, there was a boy and there was a spider and they were both alone until they weren't.A friendship, an origin.Martin thinks back to the start of his story.





	Give a Man a Fish (Give a Spider a Fly)

**Author's Note:**

> honestly idek what this is. wrote it a couple months ago and it seems okay so i figured why not post it. i'm in a posting mood. also: tags are hard and i hate them
> 
> redundant warning: there's a spider and some kinda graphic fly death? idk man, i don't shy away from describing things but i also don't go ham on it. it happens. it's a thing.  
i'm tired. enjoy the story!

Martin doesn’t know how it starts. When it starts. Perhaps it’s always been a part of his life and it started years before he thought to notice it, to question it. He thinks that might be the closest to the truth.

In which case: it starts with a web in the corner of a little boy’s room.

* * *

Martin was a lonely child. He never knew his father, the man gone before Martin was old enough to keep memories. His mother didn’t like to look at him, especially as he grew up and settled into his features. And Martin liked books and poetry and he was too clumsy for his size. There were very few children his age who wanted to be friends with him when it was so much easier to laugh behind his back. So he was lonely and spent plenty of time inside and he wasn’t surprised that he looked elsewhere for companionship.

There was a web in the highest corner of his room, over the corner edge of his window. It was tiny, and not as uniformly made as others he'd seen. Martin rarely saw the spider who lived on it, and doesn’t think he would have paid much attention to it after the initial few days if the spider hadn’t shown up while he was watching.

It was a tiny spider, even seen from a distance, and it moved slowly, carefully. Martin isn’t sure why, but he had the sudden revelation that the spider was probably hungry. Martin had never noticed a fly in his room, and there was nothing on the web, and he had no idea how long the spider had been waiting with nothing to show for it.

It wasn’t right. He felt sad, and upset, at the thought that this spider was dying, slowly starving to death, in _his_ room. They both lived here. And since it was Martin’s room first, that made this spider his guest, and it wasn’t right that Martin would leave it to die.

He didn’t want this spider to die.

So he put down his notebook and left his room, and spent the rest of his afternoon outside, catching bugs. It wasn’t as easy as the boys in his class made it seem and, in the end, he only came back with a pair of tiny flies, barely bigger than mosquitoes. But it was _something_ and he knew it would help.

The spider was still on its web when he came back to his room. Martin stood underneath it and lifted the jar up as close to the web as he could reach, and let the flies loose. Neither of them got caught right off, instead buzzing wildly up and out and slamming their tiny bodies against the ceiling in attempts to escape. Martin watched them for a while, and, as most children probably do, attempted to use some sort of physic power to nudge their flight paths back over to the web.

He doesn’t know if it was because of him, but one fly did go too close to the web, and one of its legs caught, then a wing, and it thrashed uselessly against the strands, only getting itself more entangled. The movement shook the web, so much so that Martin feared it would tear apart, but it didn’t. The spider seemed shocked into stillness for the first moments, staying in its corner and simply swaying with the motions as it, too, watched the fly and its pointless struggles.

“Go on,” Martin whispered then, watching intently. “It’s for you. You’ll like it, I know you will.”

It feels inane, now, recalling this so many years later. Talking to the little spider, so unused to hunting that he had to coax it into action. Speaking to it at all, as if it might understand him, when their language barrier was so great that there was no way anything he said could break through.

But the spider had moved, after his words. Had scuttled over the warped lines of its web, coming closer to the trapped fly. The next part hadn’t happened as quick as Martin thought it would, but perhaps that was the distance speaking. He was too far from that tiny world, and he knows he missed details. He didn’t quite witness the bite, though he’s sure it happened. And he couldn’t see where the webbing came from, only that the spider moved with purpose to pull and weave and spin and steadily wrap the fly in a little white cocoon. It paused then, sat in a stillness that Martin chose to believe was brought on by exhaustion—so much effort in such a short time, after so long without having to expend this much energy.

The spider stayed next to that cocoon for a long time after, even after the other fly finally found its way to the web, mirroring the dance of the other until it finally stopped, falling as still as its captor and simply laying there, waiting for its inevitable end.  
At some point, Martin made his way back to his bed, sitting and settling in—and still he watched, keeping his eyes on the web and its spider, waiting with an odd mix of worry and anxiety and excitement.

Time passed, as it does, but Martin barely noticed. His entire being was focused on that corner of his room, his guest and its meal and the tiny spark of satisfaction deep within him for providing it. Even with his watching, or perhaps because of his steady gaze, he didn’t notice that the spider had eaten its meal until it moved away from the shriveled husk to work on the other fly. Martin watched as, again, the spider bit and wrapped its prey; this time quicker and with more enthusiasm than the first. Eating had done so much more than Martin could have hoped.

He was… happy. Happy that this spider had gotten to eat, that it wouldn’t fade away and die in its lonely little corner, and that it would still be there for the days to come, keeping Martin company in his own lonely corner of the world.

They were a bit alike, in that sense, weren’t they?

Martin fell asleep easily that night, content in the knowledge that he wasn’t truly alone anymore.

* * *

And that was the start of it, Martin thinks now. The first choice he made to set him on this path, unknowing and yet uncaring of whatever consequences might come of it. After all, all he'd done was help something that might possibly be considered a friend. Nothing more, nothing less. It certainly hadn’t seemed life-changing back then—only a small boy's attempt to do something good.

That's how it all starts, though, isn’t it? One good deed.

Just one.

**Author's Note:**

> i kinda want to make a series of 'soft monster' stories but i don't actually have any others written. so who knows. maybe. we'll see.


End file.
